Haas’ Mick Schumacher was not happy after losing out to Lewis Hamilton in the Austrian Grand Prix Sprint race.
Haas driver Mick Schumacher had a close battle with Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton towards the end of the Austrian GP sprint race. While the German’s defence against the seven-time world champion was lauded, he could not hold off the Briton for the final points-scoring place.
Schumacher was trying to hold off Hamilton in quicker Mercedes using the DRS. The aid was only available to him as he was in the DRS range of his own teammate Kevin Magnussen.
But later on, Magnussen increased the distance between him and Schumacher by one second thus taking away the latter’s DRS advantage.
Following this, Schumacher requested his Danish teammate to slow down on the team radio but that did not happen. It resulted in Hamilton overtaking Schumacher for P8, which is also the final points-scoring position in a sprint race.
After the race, a furious Schumacher revealed that he believes he should have been swapped with Magnussen as he had more pace.
He revealed that he had asked his engineer on the team radio for a swap which was declined. When asked if the team gave him a reason for not swapping, Schumacher said, “That’s something I have to understand.”
The day got even much worse for the German driver as he was reminded of a potential penalty for a starting procedure infringement. Schumacher was not entirely sure what he was being investigated for.
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Magnussen says he was not asked to slow down for Mick Schumacher
Furthermore, while Schumacher said that the battle with Hamilton was fun, he believes it could have been skipped.
Schumacher had better pace and if he had been swapped he wouldn’t have been left to battle with the Mercedes battle in the first place. As a quicker Hamilton overtook him, Schumacher was knocked out of the points-scoring position.
In his interview, Magnussen revealed that he got no instructions from the team to slow down for Schumacher to give him a DRS advantage.
The Danish driver said, “I obviously can’t hear what Mick says. But you know, it’s a great day for us. We got two points, we are starting P7 and P9 for tomorrow’s main race. We really can’t be disappointed with this in any way.”
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